I had the pleasure of helping to beta test the new toolbar over the last few weeks with Fluffanutta and I can say that it’s spectacular with stuff like the ability to switch between multiple accounts instantly, instant creation of any cobranded lens you want, and a ton more.

Yea, it’s free too.

Bonus: Send me your Review of the new Toolbar or post it in the comments and I’ll take the best ones and post them on Captain Squid for everyone to see (with attribution to your blog or lenses, of course).

BDKZ has started a blog devoted to Hey! Monkeybrain called Cowabunga!. I think it’s a great and original concept that allows blogging about hot issues (Like Pirates Vs. Ninjas) while incorporating Squidoo at the same time. Very fun and very cool. Great job BDKZ ! (Psst… Ive got a few debates going on Chickens and Eggs, Star Trek and Star Wars, and Paper or Plastic )

Duel Modules now� load when a page loads making them Evergreen! More evergreen modules is good for search engines and by extension, good for lensmasters!

Fluffanutta has released the latest version of his Advanced Squidoo Dashboard Utility on SquidUtils.com . It allows some cool new organization methods such as sorting by lens category and lens type, which are both really really useful.

Meanwhile Back at SquidU:

There’s the beginnings of a good thread on Directories and Blog Submission sites for Squidoo Lenses. Look for some of these to get added to the Squidoo Training Center this week.

Sneaky Observation of the week:

There’s only 153 Squid Lit lenses… have you read a book or 20 lately?

Combining multiple tools in one place is something the Captain is a big fan of, and I must admit, Fluff has done an admirable job doing just that.

Now, when you click ‘edit‘ on any one of your lenses from the ‘Advanced Lensmaster Dashboard‘ you are taken to a screen that has your lens framed in and a menu of great options on the left hand side:

Full Lens Info: This will return pre-formatted HTML code for your lens as well as BBC code for use in forum signatures. Your lens name, category, update time, URL, and description are all posted, allowing you to see how your lens is displayed at a glance.

Lens Maintenance: You can now edit, Publish, and view your lens from one place without losing the Squid Utils navigation.

Lens Statistics: Check up on your traffic, royalties, and other stats for each lens from here.

Lens Promotion: This is super useful, allowing you to do many things to promote your lens very quickly. This includes the Add This bookmarking tool, Lensroll.com submission, Isle of Squid Squidoo Link Directory Submission, as well as a Ping feature to notify all the major crawlers that you’ve got new content.

Search Engines: With a few quick clicks, you can double check to see that your lens is indexed in the major search engines. Extremely useful!

If you haven’t stopped by Squid Utils to check out the new management tools, you probably should. There is maximum piratey goodness for minimum price (currently free).

-The Captain

Ok my Deckhands and Swabbies, it’s time to get down to business. Today The Captain is going to share a great promotional tool with you.

Promoting your lens can be one of the most challenging aspects of Lesmastering.

Many people tell you to make sure and ping all the blog services and submit to Del.icio.us and Digg.

I have tried this a few times and have seen pretty much zero traffic from these methods.

Why Pinging and Social Bookmarking don’t work that well.

The simple fact is that Squidoo lenses are designed to provide very targeted information. If someone is not looking for the information you have than it’s not likely that they will enjoy your lens, much less buy someting.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could submit your lenses to a place where pre-targeted visitors will view it? You can, Here’s how….

1. Head on over to Squid Utils and log in using your lensmaster ID.
2. Click on ‘Lensmaster RSS Feeds‘
3. Right Click on the link to your Lensmaster Lenses RSS feed. It should look something like this: http://squidutils.com/lensmaster/loyalis/lenses.rss
4. Click ‘Copy Link Location‘
5. Paste this link into a notepad or Word document so you have it handy.
6. Head over to Zimbio and sign up for an account. (What’s Zimbio? Learn more about it here..)
7. When you set up your account, it allows you to add a blog. Copy and Paste the feed address of your lenses as the blog address.
8. Zimbio will automagically search through your feed (all of your lenses) and add ones to appropriate Wikizines automatically.
9. Add any that aren’t automatically filed away can be manually added by clicking on ‘My Dashboard -> My Articles -> My Queue’.
10. Check back every few days and see if any more lenses have been pulled into Zimbio to be added to appropriate groups.

Why using Zimbio is good

• This whole process shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to do.
• You instantly get a high PR backlink for all of your lenses you submit.
• Zimbio gets over a million pageviews a month
• People that read the teaser for your lens will want to click through to your lens. These users are already interested in your topic.
• These interested users are targeted traffic which is much more valuable than plain old no-targeted traffic.

-The Captain

Here’s my top five in no particular order:

• Sell My Lens – This site is a fee free auction marketplace to buy and sell Squidoo Lenses and URLs. With the recent Giant Squid activity usage has been a little low, but I expect it to pick up as Squidoo grows.
• Lensroll – N376 (Glen) has created an excellent Digg-type website to help promote Squidoo Lenses. Submit only your best lenses here and you’ll see a bit of a traffic boost from other users looking for great lenses.
• Squidoo Utils - This is a very cool advanced Dashboard created by Fluffanutta. You can track all of your lenses Page Rank, mass bookmark, Add your lenses to your favorites quickly, and get RSS feeds for your lenses or of your lenses.
• Squidoo Cool - This is a Blog run by Lewis Smile, another prolific lensmaster. He offers some good tips on different Squidoo aspects. His focus is on Social Bookmarking and Lens Promotion, two important areas. Lewis also builds custom lenses at Build My Lens.
• Dashboard Extender - This is a firefox plugin for Squidoo that allows your dashboard to show total visitors, average visitors per lens, earnings history, ratings history, and more. A very useful plugin for tracking your Squidoo Empire. Written by Magicality.

That’s all for today! Stay tuned for more great tips.

- The Captain